In overdrive: Randy Bachman on Vinyl Tap Stories

The first time Randy Bachman heard himself on the radio, he cried. He thought he’d made the big time.

Of course, that was back in 1962 and Bachman was only a kid, and his band, Chad Allan and the Reflections, was still years away from becoming The Guess Who. Nevertheless, when the local after-school radio program played the band’s first single, Tribute to Buddy Holly, it felt like the real deal.

“You actually sit and listen to it and you’re in awe and disbelief and you actually cry,” Bachman says, his voice slowing down as he remembers. “We actually had tears. This is your Elvis moment or your Beatles moment or your Madonna moment.”

Bachman has come a long way since then, both musically with The Guess Who and BTO, and with his radio presence. In 2005, Bachman started hosting Vinyl Tap on CBC Radio. Although it started as a summer replacement show, thanks to the CBC strike that year it got replayed and became a hit. Small wonder: Bachman pours his years of experience and anecdotes into weekly themed shows, playing music and telling backstage stories on topics from everything to girls’ names to transportation.

The show, which also has a podcast on the way, is the basis for Bachman’s new book, Vinyl Tap Stories. The project collects the anecdotes and insight Bachman offers up on his two-hour show and distills them into themed chapters, each of which ends with a suggested playlist.

“I had a lot of emails coming to Vinyl Tap — it’s almost an interactive show in a way — that said, ‘We want a copy of your show,’ ‘I want a copy of the thing you did on guitars,’ ” Bachman says. But, he adds, the music is such an integral part of the show that he didn’t see how he could make his radio work as readily available as his rock ’n’ roll catalogue without including the tracks.

“I’m not a record label,” he says. “I can’t go and license the songs and [add] my stories and sell that.”

The chapter playlists help with that, and although he’s a busy man — besides doing the radio show, Bachman still tours as a solo act, as well as with iterations of The Guess Who and BTO — putting a book together based on radio shows he had already done didn’t require that much extra work. Bachman didn’t write much new material for Vinyl Tap Stories, but he says doing the book did give him the chance to fix some minor errors.

“I don’t have a script; I just kind of go in and talk,” he says of Vinyl Tap. “So I’m not really dead-on correct when I mention the date when I met so and so — it might be June or it might be July — or January. I know it began with a J.”

Now in his sixties, Bachman is still an imposing figure, tall and broad with white hair and a white beard. His gig with CBC, now in its sixth season, is his first real job, he jokes. His father would be so proud.

Bachman remembers getting excited as a child to finish dinner and have a bath so he could get into his pyjamas and lie on the floor listening to the radio — “the theatre of the mind,” he says. Later, the radio was a thrill because it broadcast his music across Winnipeg, his hometown, and into the rest of Canada, the United States and the world.

For many Canadians, Bachman is a rock legend; for others, though, he’s the guy their parents like to listen to on a Saturday night. Some of his younger radio fans didn’t even realize he was in a band.

“It’s a backward acknowledgment,” Bachman says of the compliments he gets for his back catalogue.

Despite a lifetime of radio play, though, Bachman says that thrill of hearing your songs come through the car speakers hasn’t faded one bit.

“When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it’s Nashville or it’s London or I’m driving in the taxi to the hotel and on comes one of my songs, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they’re still playing these songs on the radio,’ ” he says. “And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.”